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ninjin

3,431 karma · joined September 4, 2011

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ninjin··on OpenBSD Stories: Strange Medieval Devices
You still see interesting efforts today. Here is a dmesg from a Tadpole SPARCbook 6500 booting 7.9 (released in May this year) that appeared on bugs@ just a few weeks ago (also, note who the person is that responds to that message):

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-bugs&m=178663407424547

You of course also have the absolutely insane luna88k support [1] and I have myself been looking into getting my hands on a landisk [2] box as the Hitachi SuperH CPU is fascinating (I only knew of it from old arcade boards and the Sega Dreamcast).

[1]: https://www.openbsd.org/luna88k.html

[2]: https://www.openbsd.org/landisk.html

ninjin··on U.S. sanctions against the A/I Collective
In my experience, groups like this have a fairly hostile relationship to State Communism as well. The Kronstadt rebellion for example is frequently cited [1]. But then you have groupings like Anarchist communists [2], which you would then risk lumping together with the anti-Communism part (not to mention that anti-Communism as a term is usually associated with forces staunchly opposed to people like this). Plus, if you are "only" anti-authoritarian, how do you suggest avoiding getting lumped together with Anarcho-capitalism?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kronstadt_rebellion

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_communism

Furthermore, these organisations operate in what they perceive to be Fascist and/or Capitalist societies, so why state opposition to something that is not "there" and has been pretty much gone from the global scene for nearly forty years?

In conclusion, yes, you have a point. But given the reasons above I find it really hard to get worked up over it and Anarchists do not generally get along with Leninists, Stalinists, or Maoists anyway.

ninjin··on Decompiling a Nintendo 64 game in 84 days
If you are interested in the "sequel", Perfect Dark, then there is this PC port based on the decompilation project that plays great:

https://github.com/perfect-dark-pc-port/perfect_dark

Ported it to OpenBSD for fun an evening about a year ago.

ninjin··on Run OpenBSD on DigitalOcean for $4/month
Always happy to see more people having fun with OpenBSD. Running my own set of OpenBSD boxes (although the public-facing ones are on Hetzner), so I read through the instructions and it aligns with my own experience (although I usually emphasise that most correct choices in the installer are just the default).

However, this part: "Since this is going to be a bare-bones web server we can remove most of the sets.". This is not great advice. Reducing the number of sets even on a headless server can lead to issues with ports depending on libraries Xenocara provides that would then be missing (fonts, etc.). Likewise, when you upgrade the default is to install all sets unless you manually intervene, which could lead to a surprise bump in disk usage that you may not have accounted for. In general, reducing the number of sets should be considered "I am deviating from the defaults and I know what I am doing" territory and Theo keeps threatening to remove the option to select the sets in the installer when people complain and I am inclined to agree with him. So, if you have 10GB of disk in that Droplet, just do the OpenBSD thing and go with the defaults and you will be all the happier for it down the line. Messing with the installation size really is for those rare cases (fitting many VMs on a single host, ancient machines, etc.) where you have no other choice.

ninjin··on Casio F-B100W-1A
A lot of love here as well for the F-91W. As for the band, I use mine with a Phoenix Nato strap [1], which I suspect will last as long as the watch itself (if you are on a budget, there are plenty of PRC Nato clones out there). I wear it daily, as well as with my suit given how stylish it is in its simplicity. The only maintenance necessary is to gently run an open flame along the strap holes maybe once a year control the growth of loose nylon threads.

[1]: https://www.phoenixstraps.com

ninjin··on Muse Glimmer: 30B-parameter model optimized for always-on local agent workflows
2a03:2880: by any chance?:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48137854

Have asked them to stop numerous times and they just keep hitting for about eight months now.

ninjin··on How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026
Tried to see if it was possible to buy the Rom itself. But it seems like you would need to buy a physical copy at this point:

https://modretro.com/products/xibalba-64

ninjin··on TinyNES Review – A Super Niche NES Console
An additional option is how I get RGB video and clean audio out of my HVC-101 without modifying the console itself:

https://krikzz.com/our-products/cartridges/rgb-blaster.html

It is a lot of work and usually not cheap to get old consoles to capture properly, so I am only bothering with Nintendo consoles as that is what my childhood was. At the time of writing, I have solutions to play games on original hardware from every console apart from the Nintendo 64 and Nintendo DS family. Not because it is not possible, but rather that I can not justify the expense at the moment.

ninjin··on NetBSD 11.0
Yes, and it is in fact the NetBSD Bluetooth stack [1] that OpenBSD had ported from the 4.2 release until it was ripped out in 5.6 [2]. Not to mention that the NetBSD Bluetooth stack is based on code from FreeBSD.

[1]: https://man.netbsd.org/NetBSD-11.x-BRANCH/bluetooth.3

[2]: https://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-5.5/bluetooth.4

There is a lot of sharing going on between the BSDs. Most commonly drivers being handed back and forth.

ninjin··on Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights
Had one of the OpenBSD Blowfish t-shirts [1] and wore if for many years until it broke. My best memory of it was as an intern in Silicon Valley, when suddenly the CEO who never had seemed that technical, walked past me and one of the secretaries talking and going: "Blowfish, right? Nice!". He earned a lot of respect from this intern that day.

It is a shame that the OpenBSD folks do not reprint their old designs as I would buy about ten different ones in an instant.

[1]: https://www.openbsd.org/tshirts.html#4

ninjin··on Superlogical
Was not familiar with the guy and this is certainly a take:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobias_L%C3%BCtke#Voting_right...

ninjin··on Our position on open-weights models
I do not have a stance on the Maldives, Guam, etc. as I lack enough historical and current context. What I always do is try to derive positions based on the human right to self-determination.

About Taiwan. I find the claim that since an absolute monarchy controlled the island 150 years ago, that then a government which was the result of two (is my count correct?) revolutions overthrowing that monarchy and then another government, a government which failed to conquer the land by military means by 1950, and now after people have lived independently for over 75 years (over 25 of which as a democracy) that said government has any right to dictate how said people should live to be simply absurd. If the people of the RoC wants to join with the PRC, that is for them to decide through their own decision processes. Historical claims like this may make sense for unpopulated tracts of land, but here we are talking about the rights to self-determination of more than twenty million people of which the vast majority were born well after 1950. This would set a terrible precedence and, frankly, it feels akin to how emperors and kings of old asserted their "rights" and not how we move towards a more just world.

Also, Hong Kong? If anything, Hong Kong shows that the PRC is a poor custodian for a pluralistic country with multiple parallel systems. I once thought it reasonable for Hong Kong to be "returned" after the historical travesty that were the Opium Wars, but I have heard enough first-hand accounts of the suffering and tragedy that unfolded over the last ten years to reconsider whether I prioritise history over the people that are alive here and now. It was not that Mao and Xi "unfortunately had to use force" against Tibet and Hong Kong. These were calculated choices on their part and history shall judge them the same way we judge any other oppressor for their moral failures.

ninjin··on Our position on open-weights models
No, I do not think that is a fair portrayal of my position. Just like I will not say that your position is simply appeasement and hoping for the best. One must always be charitable in a discussion with strangers whose positions you do not fully understand.

Rather, I think we should look hard into ourselves and what is good and bad about the current world order. For example, the people of the RoC have the right to determine which direction they want to go. Regardless of the chauvinistic rhetoric coming out of Beijing. We should all stand up for this, because it is a universal right that we want everyone to enjoy. Similarly, we should push against the Eleven-dash line and support the 2013 ruling. The list goes on and I am sure these issues can be resolved without an outright war if we are careful, yet firm, in our beliefs and also diplomatically preemptive and thoughtful.

Being concerned about PRC imperialism should not be mistaken for the position that their people should "know their place" and be suppressed back to the stone age. They have the right to enjoy the fruits of their labour and pursue happiness, just like everyone else. We simply must be there to remind them (just like we must remind ourselves) that the course of humanity is a collective project if we are to stay clear of the darker sides of our nature as we venture together into the future.

ninjin··on Our position on open-weights models
Not sure if "colonial" is the right word though, as we should be careful to think that oppression always takes on the form we have seen in the past (US imperialist oppression for example did not take on the form of the colonialism that preceded it) . Also, be careful with "true" there. I do not think this is some sort of subterfuge, but rather an inherent weakness in us as a species. Vest power in anyone, and before long their morals will give way and an oppressor will be born.

The way I look at it, until Deng the PRC's economic policies and internal instability kept it from growing at the pace of many of its neighbours. Then we had an era of intense growth (which is still to some degree ongoing). However, as a reaction to this era Xi and others needed a narrative to counter the increased corruption and a new unifying myth to replace the cult of growth as the economy would stagnate at some point and could then call into question the authority of CCP to rule. Their choice of nationalism is what scares me and I know PRC citizens (even CCP members) that share this perspective and would rather have seen the Shanghai clique to have remained. It is possible that in this alternative reality we would still end up with "Imperialism with Chinese characteristics" ("中国特色帝国主义"?), but I chose to believe that at the very least the chances of this would have been smaller.

ninjin··on Our position on open-weights models
I keep hearing this and I fail to see any reason to believe that it will be the case. Any empire, in the history of our species, has always had an initial "inward-looking" period prior to becoming a full-fledged imperialist oppressor. Edo-period Japan into Imperial Japan, for example. Rather, what I think any budding empire needs a period of growth to become a large enough fish and also to delude its leadership and population into the convenient mindset that their flavour of imperialism is good and justified ("Hakkou ichiu", "The white man's burden", etc.).

To me, the PRC is at the very end of that process and I recommend anyone doubting this to go and read conversations and listen to the words of the populace that is turning increasingly nationalistic and you will hear the same old tales of revanchism and exceptionalism that we are used to hearing (during my recent visit, I watched the morning news every day for about a week and without fail a military inspection, new ship, new plane, etc. was presented each day). In addition, I think those outside of Asia are very much shielded from the early signs, but go and read about PRC influence and tensions in South Korea, Japan, RoC, Philippines, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, India, Pakistan, and Tajikistan and you will see something rather different than "inward-looking". To me, here the PRC is simply testing the waters for the extent of the influence of other powers and how far it can go. Likewise, we are seeing overseas naval bases being constructed which sure is an indication for a desire to project power outwards.

I want to believe that this time it will be different. I really do. Apologists around me say "It will only be Taiwan and the South China Sea, then then it will stop." and I would love to believe them. But can anyone truly internalise the narrative that international utopia will be spearheaded by a deeply authoritarian state that controls information like no other (and gladly exports that technology), disappears its own population at will, spins an increasingly strong nationalistic narrative, etc.? No, sorry, I think the "inward-looking" narrative is simply a convenient way for us to close our eyes and find comfort in ignorance, rather than in facts.

ninjin··on Game of Trees – Git-based version control from OpenBSD folks
Yes and no, my experience with it is that it is trying to be a minimal Git format-compatible tool that conforms with the coding style and practices of the OpenBSD community, along with their style of development: patches onto mailing lists. It is likely the hope of its developers that it would be included into OpenBSD base at some point. So, true, the license is a part of it, but one part of many.

There is also this:

https://gothub.org

ninjin··on Donation Controversy
I am in a similar situation and I am out from this point as well. Mullvad does a lot of wonderful work, but I think debating whether Örebropartiet's positions are reasonable or not misses the point. Head over to Allard's Twitter feed [1], as he has not yet published a coherent manifesto anywhere from what I can tell. If you do not read Swedish, get some sort of translation tool going. Keep in mind, this is how he wants to appear to the world.

[1]: https://xcancel.com/markus_allard

Sure, you find the odd reasonably put politic position. But, mostly, it is memes. Screaming. Ranting. Insults. Calling the head of the Swedish police a "crying bitch". Retweets of posts from who are not even shy in terms of being bigots and racists. The man is a toxic toad and I would rather have seen him paid to shut up than anything else. Yes, we need diverse viewpoints to be heard and we should be respectful and careful to shut them down. But, Allard is not this person and he is just ruining public discourse even further and waging an insane culture war (in my mum's constituency at that). Call me old-fashioned, but I expect representatives to at least try to strive towards holding morals and behaviour above the mean of society.

I have read Mullvad's blog post, but not Berntsson' yet (it is bloody long and I am at work, but skimming it, I saw nothing arguing why "public discourse arson" is warranted and just "something needs to be done, this is something"), so maybe I am missing some context. But if the answer to your question is "Bank-roll Allard", maybe it is time to take a step back and ask yourself what on Earth your question was in the first place? Because it seems to me like you are playing with fire and risk burning all that we hold dear to the ground. Do your views not have a Johan Norberg-like [2] character (something very rare, a Swedish Libertarian that has contributed to public discourse for over twenty years) that you can support instead? Or is the direction you want to see only professed by people that behave very close to what I would describe as the very worst our species have to offer?

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johan_Norberg

ninjin··on The lost joy of music piracy
Not allegedly, I was there at the time as a user and I and others can confirm that there was plenty of scene releases on Spotify in ~2008:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43202117

ninjin··on Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely
No, but it would have been a move from the research division to the applications division at the time. This is around ten years ago, between Atari (pre-Google acquisition) and AlphaGo (post-Google acquisition), so I am unsure exactly what the effect would have been inside the organisation. But, if it was bad enough for people to want to leave I suspect it can not just have been about the label.

I should emphasise that DeepMind (based in London and having a very large degree of independence until the merger in 2023) and Google DeepMind (remember now that Google's research labs across the globe got merged into this entity, including the one in London that was previously split from DeepMind "proper", so it can be hard to tell at times what one means by "DeepMind") has always produced good research. But what led to the LLM explosion primarily came from Google Research Mountain View (Transformer), Google Research Seattle (BERT), OpenAI (GPT-3), and various academic labs. During this time DeepMind had a broad research agenda, but my impression is that most resources went towards more traditional deep learning agents in 3D environments, foundational algorithmic research, and games (StarCraft 2). I would provide more detail, but as as an NLP researcher, I did frankly not pay much attention to DeepMind in that era as what was interesting to me just came from elsewhere.

When Google made its first big move into LLMs, its first interesting work did not come out of DeepMind, but rather again Mountain View with PaLM in 2022. Someone with closer connections to Demis at the time can probably explain why the research agenda was what it was, but I lack those connections and DeepMind (even now) has been notoriously tight-lipped since the founding of OpenAI (Demis allegedly sees OpenAI as founded on DeepMind technology by interns and staff walking out on them and remember OpenAI's initial focus on games with Dota 2 compared to DeepMind's with StarCraft 2) and was rather insular compared to Google Research, FAIR, etc. I say "was", but not because DeepMind is now more open, but rather that all industry research outlets are now incredibly tight-lipped after LLMs becoming a product and point of pride among them. At this point, research is held back for maybe even a year before publication or never published at all to deny any perceived advantage to the competition.

ninjin··on Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely
But even geniuses make mistakes. For example, Demis bet hard against language having any sort of real impact in AI research. So hard in fact that DeepMind nearly had its language research team walk out on them as they were about to be labelled as "applied". Now, to be fair, once the evidence was mounting that large language models rather than pure reinforcement learning was the way forward Demis and DeepMind changed course and has been great at catching up. However, it is important to remember that no person is infallible.
ninjin··on OpenWrt One – Open Hardware Router
As a counter opinion to "too slow" in regards to 54Mbps, as it likely depends on your use cases. My WRT54GL was the primary family router until 2018 and even worked just fine for live video broadcasting. Even today it sees good use for video calls with no issues at all. Lovely little piece of hardware that refuses to die. Just a shame that OpenWRT has dropped support since 2013, which feels a bit ironic given their name.
ninjin··on OpenSSH 10.4/10.4p1 Released
Well, you can have a look at the commit history to see what changes have been accepted in the past:

https://github.com/openbsd/www/commits/master

My experience is that minor improvements tend to get accepted if they come with a solid technical motivation and fits into the overall OpenBSD mindset and ecosystem. If the change is simply justified by "best practices" and is rather large, then the conservative choice of just leaving things as they are usually prevail.

For example, I think I have seen two proposals for major overhauls of the OpenBSD.org homepage by "outsiders" over the last three years or so and they were both rejected. However, as you can see by the commit log, minor improvements (including presentation ones) happen all the time.

ninjin··on Order a burned CD of your own public GitHub repo
Really? A cause of our societal decline is requesting a CD for a repository that is too big to fit on it? Call me a naive optimist, but I would like to believe that whoever is reading the form results on GitHub's end is more than capable to make the call within a few seconds as to whether they also would find some joy in the challenge the size poses or just ignore it and move on with their day.
ninjin··on Order a burned CD of your own public GitHub repo
Riddle me this, what was the cost to me in terms of trying? If I feel like treating this like the fun we used to have online, what is the point in sucking all the fun out of it by "going lawyer" on the conditions? If I get a CD (or even DVD), it will be a fun story to tell (like when I asked Schneier to write a true Schneier Fact as opposed to his signature when I ordered a signed copy of one of his books). If I get nothing, well, I guess my life is simply over at that point.
ninjin··on Order a burned CD of your own public GitHub repo
Felt the same way initially, but you are very much right that this feels like a throwback to a more playful time about twenty years ago. Put in a request for the OpenBSD src repository, which is too big to fit on a CD these days and I am looking forward to see if/how they square that circle. OpenBSD used to ship their code on CDs up until about ten years ago, so it is a bit of a fun throwback in that way as well.
ninjin··on The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party
Why would we? There are plenty of us that believe in free speech, but would rather not see our money go towards bankrolling further destroying public discourse like you see Allard doing. It is perfectly possible to forward your opinions without setting the public square on fire. The kind of rhetoric that you profess here is dangerous and I see it all too often in the US. If no side attempts to hold the high ground, all we will have is a race towards the bottom and at some point arguing that it is high time to send the other side off to the camps and that is not a future I want to see.
ninjin··on The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party
Tried to find something from the party itself, but found nothing on their homepage other than that they plan to publish a party programme "gradually, starting some time during the summer of 2026".

https://www.orebropartiet.se/var-politik/

ninjin··on Linux eliminates the strncpy API after six years of work, 360 patches
> Of course I get downvoted for saying this. HN isn't interested in reality any more.

I suspect that rather many of us are simply just tired of Claude and friends getting shoehorned into any conversation about programming at this point. It is about as fun as the Rust Brigade entering any discussion about C. It adds nothing new to the discussion and it is frankly tiring since we pretty much at any time have a handful of conversations on the front page already covering "AI" topics anyway (counting four at the time of writing this).

ninjin··on I told them forced consent was unlawful. 5 years later it cost Elkjop €1.8M
Hmm, probably beats my default: abuse@$COMPANY.com
ninjin··on 7.8 magnitude earthquake shakes part of southern Philippines. Tsunami possible
Yes, that is common though. You have a variety of measurements, from a variety of technologies, from a variety of distances, and from a variety of sources. Given the damage a quake and tsunami can cause, especially the early measurements are estimates that later get corrected in light of new information. In Japan for example, it is very much not uncommon that early tsunami warnings are later cancelled. Yes, false alarms are bad, but the example I usually use in terms of how much time can matter is the 1983 Sea of Japan quake [1], where the tsunami hit in 12 minutes after the quake.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Sea_of_Japan_earthquake

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